Digital Darkroom ... notyet

I've been interested in the darkroom aspect of photography for some time. It allows the photographer to complete the cycle of imaging, instead of handing part of it off to random people.

My good friend John Wardale, an experienced amateur who used to do his own darkroom work worked a lot on talking me out of a chemical darkroom. His reasoning seemed sound --

  1. it requires time (an all too rare commodity)
  2. you can't manipulate color process film and prints the way you can B&W materials
  3. color must be printed and processed in total darkness, unlike the safelight handling of B&W printing.
  4. color must be handled at exact temperatures
Eventually his arguments added up and I decided to not bother with a traditional darkroom and go directly to a digital darkroom. The film would still be processed by random machines, but I could control the rest of the process.

Starting in late 2001 I was planning my digital darkroom In the months since that project started it has fizzled. The big problem is that I spend too much of my time behind computers as it is. Unfortunately the digital darkroom is just another way to spend more time behind a computer without getting out and doing something different. While I love computing, my work has somewhat burned me out; I don't even have time to maintain my home computers or work on my own software any more. I need to get away, if even for a bit.

I also realized that for the modest amount I was planning on spending I could get quite a good enlarger and a kit of traditional darkroom facilities. I happen to be fortunate that my house already has a darkroom I can start with. However, I want to expand it to be a bit more comfortable to be in :) It is a walk in closet style and not conducive to spending enjoyable time in. The outer walls of the basement which form two sides give it a nice chill, and there isn't room to sit down and think. While there is cold water plumbing, there is no drain. So much for my thoughts; this paragraph will move to my darkroom page once I start it.

I am still interested in digital darkroom, and will work towards one a bit more slowly. For now, however, I want to concentrate on photography and look towards a traditional darkroom.


This is my rambling about ideas and plans and equipment for my digital darkroom. They still aren't organized, and since I'm putting it aside for the interim, it isn't worth organizing.

You may notice that for all this photography information that I have no photographs to display! The sad truth is that I have no place in my computer room to setup my ancient huge flatbed scanner. That and the slight problem that the only system I had to use it with is my roommate's P100 running Win95 ... which of course he would like to use most of the time. Same goes for my photo quality Inkjet ... at least it is turned on and working, but it is also stuck behind the windows box.

However, that is about to change ... I recently purchased a Power Mac G4 to build my own Digital Darkroom with. My friend John Wardale talked me out of building a wet darkroom a few years back. Looking back I think that is a good choice; I never seem to have enough time to work on things, and that is exactly what you need for a chemical darkroom. A digital darkroom, on the other hand ... well you can save the images you are working on and come back later. Whether 3 minutes, 3 hours, or 3 weeks is just a matter of timing. I still need to someplace to locate it my equipment, but I'll have my scanner hooked up again shortly. That will let me scan the 4x6s that I normally have printed when my film is developed. The scanner does a good job (IMO) of scanning, and the quality is good enough for photos on the WWW.

On the subject of flatbed scanners ... I'm starting to look at a newer flatbed to replace my current one with. Many of the newer scanners, especially the Epson ones, are also setup as quite reasonable film scanners. They are also faster, of photo quality, and can scan medium format negatives. Quite possible they are the most reasonable cost medium-format film scnaners which you can purchase. And, of course, they can also scan prints and posters and documents and all those other things which can be scanned. Unfortunately it is difficult to find a larger (legal size) flatbed these days ... so the newer hardware can't completely replace my old scanner. I just need to find someplace out-of-the-way to put it. I've been thinking about making a printer and scanner hutch for years. Maybe it is time to get around to it :)

Longer term for the digital darkroom I'm planning on purchasing a Nikon Coolscan negative scanner to perform the scanning duties and forgo the intermediate print transition and processing losses. I've kept my eye on film scanners for the last several years and I have been continually impressed by the Nikon Coolscan line. Their current generation Coolscan 4000 has a Dmax as high as typical drum scanners which cost 3x or 4x as much.... and the price has stayed constant while the capabilities get better. The Digital Ice seems to do a good job eliminating scratches and aging of negatives. The nearest competitor, in my mind at least, are the Polaroid scanners. They have the same 4000 DPI resolution as Nikon, but lack the Digital ICE facility; they also cost less. I keep my film clean, but still it seems you need to retouch for the dust ... and Digital ICE seems to be an excellent way to avoid that work.

In the printing department I currently have a HP Inkjet, an 890C. This prints very nice photos on plain paper; the results are quite good for something that is essentially a throw away -- aka no cost compared to real photo quality printing. I haven't tried any photo-quality (with photo-paper) printing on it. It is about 5 years old now and I'm looking at buying a printer dedicated to photography output. I used to like Epson a lot, but ever since they hobbled their printers with the "Ink Chip" setup, I'm steering clear of them. i do think that they do have the best photo-quality output, though ... by all reports their "dithering" techiques (for lack of a better word) produce the most photo realistic results of all ... looking just like film grain! They also have wide-format (tabloid aka 11 or 13 inch wide) printers which are affordable. However forcing people to use proprietary ink is an anathema to me. Another think I dislike is that they don't have individual color tanks on their printers, rather one super-tank which is really a carrier for their individual color tanks. In other words, once you run out of one ink you need to dispose of copious amounts of unused inks of the other colors. So, I'm going to get a Cannon S800 Photo Inkjet. The cost is quite reasonable and all the results I've seen are of outstanding quality. The individual ink tanks are quite reasonably priced, and there is a simple optical detector to determine if a tank is empty. However, the printer isn't wide-format. I'm going to sit around a while and see what happens on that front, since it seems Canon would want to compete in that market now that they have such an excellent print engine.

The purpose of this section is to say that I'm working on getting photos in my photography page! Perhaps I can display some photos that I am proud of ... and those which I'm not so proud of to illustrate what not do do. Until then however ... I still have no photos to show!


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Last Modified: Mon Mar 25 11:31:14 CST 2002
bolo (Josef Burger) <bolo@cs.wisc.edu>